1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to windshield wipers and, more particularly, to an attachment structure for attachment to a wiper arm for holding a windshield wiper blade against the windshield, for facilitating efficient delivery of a cleaning fluid against a windshield surface and for deflecting an air stream away from a superstructure of a wiper blade.
2. Background Art
It is known to attach structures defining airfoils to a windshield wiper arm assembly to alter air flow characteristics such as shown by U.S. Pat. No. 2,799,887 to Nemic. Another known structure is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,793,666 to Wurth and has a deflector which protects the liquid nozzles of a washer fluid dispenser against the vehicle slipstream. In the Wurth structure, a disk-shaped deflector is attached to a wiper arm. The principal drawback with such a structure is that the shape of the airfoil necessitates formation by injection molding, the tooling for which is relatively costly as, for example, compared to extrusion molding.
Another feature of the Wurth structure is the formation of a receptacle for a fluid delivery conduit, which is wrapped around the disk defining the deflector. One apparent problem with this structure is that the ports in the conduit, which is flexible, may not consistently orient for a desired distribution of the cleaning fluid over the windshield. Proper assembly involves the consistent wrapping of the conduit around the disk, which generally cannot be assured and which becomes tedious and time consuming.
A still further drawback with the Wurth structure is that the deflector structure must be bolted in place on the wiper arm. This is inherently complicated, time-consuming and costly both from a manufacturing and assembly standpoint.
The present invention is specifically directed to overcoming the above-enumerated problems in a novel and simple manner.